Tuesday, 31 March 2015

Who Reviews The Two Doctors by Tony J Fyler

The Two Doctors

Written by Robert Holmes

Reviewed by Tony J Fyler

Recently in
conversation with Andrew Smith, writer of Full Circle and a number of the best
recent Big Finish titles, I learned that back in Colin Baker’s day, he was
asked by Script Editor Eric Saward to write a script including the Sontarans
and the Marie Celeste. The script for the story that would, decades later,
become The First Sontarans, got a little way – a treatment and scene breakdown
were written – before the feedback stopped coming, and it turned out that
Sontaran supremo Robert Holmes was writing The Two Doctors. Sontaran origin
stories were out, and what we got in their place was a fairly typical but
slightly overstretched slab of Holmesian satire, this time on the whole business
of eating meat, with an extra kick in the Gordon Ramsays aimed at pretentious
chefs in both their raptures and their ranting.

When it
became clear that Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines were available to reprise
their roles as the Second Doctor and Jamie McCrimmon, the relatively
straightforward Sontarans-and-meat-eating marriage gained a whole other
dimension – it was suddenly required to be a multi-Doctor story into the
bargain.

Oh and then
there was Seville.

John
Nathan-Turner, Producer for all of the 80s, had a burning desire to take Doctor
Who to foreign locations. It’s been said by Saward that the desire was rooted
in a way of Nathan-Turner getting something out of the relatively loveless job,
by allowing him to swan about on location report visits. So suddenly the story
had multiple Doctors, chefery, satire, and Sontarans in Seville. To bring the Doctors, the chefs and
the Sontarans together, Holmes added a silver thread of sci-fi to-ing and fro-ing
over a biological connection between Time Lords and their Tardises.

We’re gonna
need a bigger scout ship.

The format
of Season 22 saw the programme run stories in 45 minute episodes, and The Two
Doctors would stretch to such episodes, in order to fit in all the plotting
elements and make the most of the Seville
location.

The problem
with which would be essentially getting all the players into the same
environment. The return of the Sontarans for the first time in seven years
began with the Second Doctor and Jamie visiting a space station to put a halt to
some time experiments on behalf of the Time Lords. So – no continuity issues
there then, given that the Time Lords were only revealed as being the Doctor’s
people at the very end of Troughton’s time in the Tardis, and came as a
surprise to both his companions at the time.

In typical
Holmesian style, the satire gets its hooks in early, with Shockeye the chef
offering to buy Jamie from the Doctor like a prize bull for slaughter. The
sub-theme of genetic enhancement is quickly established too, when Shockeye is
revealed as an Androgum – a conceit that never quite works throughout the
story, these massively powerful, boilingly energetic humanoids who think of
nothing but the pleasures of the flesh, and particularly the stomach. To be
fair to the master, Holmes does deliver a lot of societal background to prop up
the idea of the Androgums, but on a kind of entropic basis, the more effort he
puts in to this, the less effective it actually feels. Chessene, the ‘augmented
Androgum’ who is behind the plan to meddle with time travel, is played
beautifully by Jacqueline Pearce, following relatively closely on the heels of
the end of Blake’s 7, in which she played the Supreme Commander of a world of
geeks, Servalan herself. But the sense of ideas being shoveled into the story
by the sackload comes across quite early on, as within minutes, we have the
Second Doctor working for the Time Lords, time travel experiments, pompous
chefs, augmented species and, very soon afterward, the raised three-fingered
hand of a Sontaran.

Meanwhile,
the Sixth Doctor is boring Peri senseless, fishing for and waffling about
gumblejacks. When he collapses unexpectedly, he begins instead to waffle about
being killed in a previous incarnation. When Peri suggests he should see a
doctor, he agrees, and sets co-ordinates to visit Dastari – head of projects on
the space station visited by the Second Doctor, and the man responsible for
augmenting Chessene. The Sixth Doctor reveals he’s also the only person capable
of isolating the symbiotic nuclei of a Time Lord.

With this
revelation, the story feels like it should really be off to the races, but
instead, this is where it runs into its first prolonged paddingfest, as the
Sixth Doctor and Peri wander round the darkened space station for evvvvver, and
then around its climbing-frame innards for what feels like even longer, while a
creature growls at them from the shadows. While Dastari, Chessene, Shockeye and
Major Varl, the first Sontaran to hit screens in the 80s, set up a base in a
remote Spanish hacienda, the Doctor and Peri mostly gibber, while discovering
that the growling thing is actually Jamie in a cowl.

The one
thing you could always be guaranteed in a Holmes script was world-class
characterization of the bit parts, and The Two Doctors is no different,
bringing English actorrrr-turned-restaurant-manager Oscar Botcherby and
‘dewy-eyed naiad’ (don’t blame us, he really calls her that), Anita, out on a
butterfly hunt when the aliens arrive.

Meanwhile,
Varl’s superior, Stike, has arrived, with the intention of carving up the
Second Doctor’s brain to steal his symbiotic nuclei and give the Sontarans the
power of time travel.

After a
little psychic tomfoolery, the Sixth Doctor picks up the sound of a bell in Seville (no really, that’s the flimsy thread on which the
story is connected), and he, Peri and Jamie hot-foot it to Spain. Alliances are strained, with
Dastari and Chessene turning against their Sontaran allies at the same moment
the Sontarans turn against them. But just when the story has another chance to
power on through and come to a reasonable end, the would-be time travelers
thwarted by their own differences and competing agendas, there’s a second long
lull as Chessene instigates a secondary plan to set the Androgums free in the
universe of time, getting Dastari to make her a time-capable Androgum mate –
the Second Doctor. When Shockeye wakes the Androgummy Doctor, the two head off
into Seville for a feeding frenzy, meaning much of the arguably unnecessary
third episode is a long justification of the foreign filming, with both Dastari
and Chessene, and the Sixth Doctor, Peri and Jamie chasing the gluttonous pair
around the city, the idea being that the Second Doctor needs a second operation
to make his Androgum nature permanent.

Another
thing you could always be sure of with Holmes was horrible death, and as the
third episode moves towards its end, the death toll gets high and gruesome –
particularly gruesome in the case of Stike and Chessene, and particularly
pointless in the case of Oscar. The Sixth Doctor also personally, horrifyingly,
kills Shockeye, offering a James Bond-style quip to the corpse. With all the
aliens destroyed though and the Second Doctor restored to his normal self, all
that’s left to do is for the Sixth Doctor and Peri to underline Holmes’ message
of vegetarianism, before the two Doctors go their separate ways.

The Two
Doctors is complex, tangled, and overly padded, with two much to do, and none
of it making a particularly high degree of sense. The Sontaran costumes and masks
were a sad disappointment even to those who hadn’t seen the Sontarans on TV
before. The Androgums were walking metaphors of the bestial nature of
carnivores, Holmes’ satirical themes writ as large and simplistic as they were
in many of his other stories. Dialogue
and characterisation though were Robert Holmes’ great strengths, and even when
the storyline makes no sense, and the padding of The Two Doctors is visible,
The Two Doctors survives as a likeable romp at least on that level. Besides,
ideas may have been shoveled into the story by the bucketload, but what that
means is it stays alive in the minds of many people for what sticks for them –
some see it as a vegetarian polemic, others as a Sontaran renaissance. Still
others remember it as the story that brought Colin Baker and Patrick Troughton
together on screen. Take what you want from The Two Doctors, there’s plenty to
enjoy – even if there’s also plenty to question.